


Oak

by blanketed_in_stars



Series: 12 Days of Shipmas [6]
Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Acorn Feels, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 02:55:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5440889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blanketed_in_stars/pseuds/blanketed_in_stars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a hill in the Shire, away from the Road and all its little wandering paths that thread through the meadows and orchards like searching fingers. Away from hobbit-holes and busy markets and the river iced over. Bilbo sets out for the hill at dusk, bundled in a coat and three scarves. He makes certain to leave his handkerchief behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oak

There is a hill in the Shire, away from the Road and all its little wandering paths that thread through the meadows and orchards like searching fingers. Away from hobbit-holes and busy markets and the river iced over. Bilbo sets out for the hill at dusk, bundled in a coat and three scarves. He makes certain to leave his handkerchief behind.

The snow is deep enough that by the time he reaches the top, he’s a little out of breath. He leans on the oak tree, one hand braced against the thickening trunk, and looks up. Through the lattice of spindly winter-bare branches, he can see the sky bright with stars, the crescent moon veiled by clouds. Although the hill is only a small one, Bilbo imagines himself on the Lonely Mountain once more, with the world wide and endless at his feet.

He packs the snow at the trunk into a firmer shape and sits, warm enough inside all his knitted layers. He smiles at the thought of what Thorin would say—what he did say, on a cold night not long after they left Lake-town, when Bilbo had wrapped himself in no fewer than five blankets and sat down by the fire, refusing to budge. _Are you a burglar or a dumpling?_

“Neither,” Bilbo murmurs to himself, resting his head against the oak, “only a little hobbit not made for this weather.”

His smile fades, remembering how Thorin had smiled, sat beside him, and stayed there. With only the oak trunk at his back, he feels—not cold, but lonely and rather lost, and isn’t there a bit of a chill in that? It doesn’t seem to matter that the oak has grown from the acorn that carried Thorin’s blessing; without Thorin himself, it could be any tree like all the others in the Shire.

But it isn’t. He rises from his snow-chair and turns to look, and remembers, as he promised, the good, the bad, and how lucky he is to be home. Lucky, even without anyone to share in the homecoming. _Plant your trees,_ Thorin had said, watch them grow. _And grow they have._

All the same—“I wish you were here,” Bilbo whispers, reaching out one woolly-gloved hand to touch the trunk. “I should—I should very much like to show you this night.” He traces the grooves of the bark and sighs. “It’s no dwarven mountain-kingdom, but it’s my home, and I think you would like it for that.”

A change in the silence, a breath of shivering wind, and the clouds over the moon dissolve. It hangs in the sky, only a sliver in the vast, cavernous night, but it glows pale like a diamond and casts its radiance on the hills and naked treetops so that all the world appears made of jewels.

With his lungs full of icy air, Bilbo smiles and the moon spins on above him, across and across to the end of the sky, there and back again.


End file.
